


Wake the Dragon (Eat the Carrot)

by Vaysh



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: HP: EWE, Head Auror Harry Potter, M/M, Past Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 14:44:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5789338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaysh/pseuds/Vaysh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Strange things happen in Harry's garden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wake the Dragon (Eat the Carrot)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dracogotgame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dracogotgame/gifts).



> Dracogotgame, this is 100% not the fic you imagined when you came up with your wonderful prompts. But there is an insulting (somewhat) snowman. And Harry and Draco are neighbours only Harry doesn't know it yet. A Happy, Healthy and Glowing New Year to you (for the 11 months that are still left of it).

The first few times Harry Potter didn't think anything of it – the straggly end of his hedge mysteriously cut into an oversized bird. The disappearance of his shining overripe plums right from the tree, mere days before he'd meant to harvest them. A fairy ring that appeared in the middle of his lawn. 

Harry had just moved into his new London home. After coming out. After the divorce. After Ginny had forgiven him and was pregnant with her third child, this one from another man. On his first weekend in the new house, they celebrated the thirtieth birthday of George (and Fred). Things got quite out of hand, what with all the Weasleys being present and an armada of Arthur's bottles of home-brewed schnaps. The party was _loud_. Had started out with Molly's quiet tears, but then got loud and wild, the more empty schnaps bottles gathered outside on the porch. And below the porch. And further into the garden where they'd later – much later – found George amidst the blackberries. 

George had been singing a song, his full drunken baritone slurred. The neighbours (invisible and so quiet that Harry suspected only ghosts lived in the Gregorian townhouse) had lighted a few candles and a man's voice could be heard, shouting that he _would_ call the Aurors if it was not the Head Auror's _warren_ making such the racket in the middle of the night. 

Harry went over the next day with left-over carrot cake (a must at every Weasley party). Nobody answered the door and Harry put the plate on the doorstep. When he checked on his way to the Ministry the next morning, plate and cake were gone. Harry had thought the matter of the nightly disturbance settled for good.

He never got the plate back, though. It wasn't a big deal. He had dozens of plates. And he was sure that, if he ever found himself out of tableware, Ginny would be happy to help him out. She had brought one set of tableware from the Prewett side into her second marriage. Her husband, Samuel, a potioneer from the Continent, had come with a 24-piece Meissen porcelain dinner service.

Still. The plate had been from Hogwarts. It was the only one Harry'd made off with. He kind of, really, would like it back. Not for the first time Harry wondered _who_ was living in the townhouse. Plate-thieves, apparently.

* *

Summer came and went, and the Hogwarts Express left King's Cross Station for Scotland. They had Aurors stationed at the train station but Voldemort had been gone ten years, and for the first time, peace felt like something real and solid to Harry. 

He gave a party for Hermione, celebrating her birthday and being promoted Deputy Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. They were not nearly as loud as on George's birthday but it's been one of the last warm days, they did have the windows open and Ron had hired a band of Romanian fiddlers. The music and the dancing went on until the small hours of the night.

Two days later, early in the morning with autumn mist already lingering between the tall trees at the back of the garden, Harry stepped out on the porch and there, right there in the middle of the lawn was a fairy ring that absolutely had not been there yesterday. Harry approached it slowly. Small to medium-sized pale brown mushrooms grew in a circle so precise it seemed to have been drawn with a pair of compasses. In the middle lay, empty, clean and gleaming like it was... polished? Harry's Hogwarts plate.

Harry crouched to get a better look but it was his plate. He recognised the bit of gold edging that had splintered off. The four-coloured Hogwarts crest in the middle looked as it always looked. But... there was something off about the words of the motto. They... sparkled? Reflected in the... sunlight? 

Abruptly Harry stood. He scanned the skies. It was too early for the sun to be up; the world was still all grey and purple shadows. He bend to the ground, picked up the plate. _Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus._ The words shimmered as if rising off the plate. Harry moved his free hand over them. The tell-tale tingling of magic swept over his skin, with a force that almost made him drop the plate. He did move back in surprise and stepped on one of the newly sprouted mushrooms, making a mess of it. Harry sighed. He had to call in Luna to get rid of the circle. This weekend James and Albus were staying with him, and those mushrooms looked suspiciously like death caps to him. (Luna later told him that the fairy ring, which she slowly lured back into the ground and vanished to appear in her own garden, had consisted of ordinary field mushrooms that would have made, with parsley and red onions, a great mushroom pie.)

Harry absently touched the ornate lettering on the plate. _... a sleeping dragon._ He stared over to the townhouse that lay quiet behind the brambles and the fence in the shadowy dusk. An inkling came to him about who his neighbour might be.

* *

After the first heavy snowfall of the year a snowman appeared in Harry's garden, rather where the fairy ring had sprouted not that long ago. It was well-proportioned, one shapely ball set upon the other. For the headpiece the snowman sported a woollen cap Harry had lost sometime back in fourth year at Hogwarts. And if this was not proof enough that _Malfoy_ had a hand in the weird occurrences in Harry's garden, there was the carrot.

It didn't sit in the middle of the snowman's white face but lower. Much lower. In fact, it stuck out of the shapely bottom ball with such a distinct upturned tilt that _penis_ was not just the first but the only word that came to mind. Together with the clearly visible lightning bolt above the coal eyes, it was obvious whose likeness the snowman was supposed to bear. 

Giggles came from the footpath, and when Harry looked over the hedge, there was a witch waving towards him and pointing at the snowman. Harry may have seen her at the Ministry but he couldn't quite place the face. In the far back of his mind the thought appeared that at least Malfoy (for it had to be Malfoy) had chosen a carrot of the right size and not some small gnarly root of a thing.

The woman was still grinning, at the snowman or at Harry, or at both of them, Harry couldn't tell. She had short black hair and was wearing a plum coloured coat with fur trimmings. 

"You should come over tonight, Potter. Bring some of that carrot cake Draco keeps raving about." Another short wave with her little hand covered in black gloves, and she was walking toward the townhouse.

 _Parkinson!_ "Parkinson," Harry called. "Do you live here?" He pointed towards his neighbour's home.

Parkinson (for it was Parkinson, grown oddly elegant in the last ten years) rolled her eyes. "No, Harry, of course not. I live over there." She pointed towards a tall narrow Victorian maybe hundred yards on the opposite side of the street. "But you should come. It's only polite among neighbours." And she was gone, hidden behind the end of Harry's hedge that he suddenly realised had been cut into a peacock all those months back in Spring.

For a moment Harry wondered whether Parkinson had been an apparition. He even walked to the hedge and peeked over it onto the footpath. In the fresh snow small dainty steps let all the way to the wrought-iron gate of the townhouse. Malfoy's townhouse. 

He stomped back to the snowman and ripped the ~~penis~~ carrot none too gently from its side. Harry weighed it in his hand and smiled. It was a well-sized carrot, fresh and healthy. The perfect ingredient for the Weasley's Carrot Cake.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are very much appreciated here or at [LiveJournal](http://hd-owlpost.livejournal.com/129783.html).


End file.
